Aaron Blythe has created, planned, promoted, and ran successful tech social meetups since 2013.

Over that time he has built 3 separate brands

  • nextfive-icon NextFive - a futurists meetup focused on AI, Robotics, and other cool topics.
  • devopsdayskc-icon DevOpsDays KC an annual two-day event for practitioners to share how they colloaborate to do awesome.
  • devopskc-icon The KC DevOps Meetup A monthly meetup for practitioners of software developers and operators to share how they colloaborate t0 do awesome.

Aaron Blythe has put on over one hundred free tech social events, sold thousands of tickets to paid events, and managed to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from sponsors and ticket sales.

NextFive

His current venture with Dustin Holub and Ben Clayton is NextFive aims to pose the question, “What do we need to be doing right now to prepare ourselves for the NextFive years?” We have held meetups in 2025 focused around Generative AI, Agentic AI, bi-pedal robotics, vibe-coding and vibe-creation. In November 2023, we held an all day event focused on Generative AI.

DevOpsDays KC

Video summaries of large DevOpsDays events where I played the role of lead organizer for 5 incredible events are below. “Welcome to DevOpsDays, Kansas City!!”

DevOpsDays is an annual two-day event for practitioners to share how they colloaborate to do awesome. In 2025, this became part of another conference and I stepped away from being associated with the event.

2024

2019

2018

2017

2016